Rt. Hons and Rebels: women, politics and political comedy
This month just gone, political party conference season has been coupled with the return of political comedy The Thick of It – still one of the only remaining reasons for watching TV – so I’ve been having some quick and disjointed thoughts about women and contemporary UK politics.
As a Welsh expatriate, I was surprised but interested to discover that there are now more women in leadership positions in the Welsh Nationalist party Plaid Cymru than there are in the UK Cabinet.
After September’s reshuffle, Theresa May remains as Home Secretary, a role in which she has occasionally talked a good game but done little materially to endear herself to women. Maria Miller’s appointment as Minister for Culture, Media and Sport, as well as Minister for Women and Equalities, got off to a flying start when an unexacting series of anti-equality accusations against her went viral; even if the list was badly and disingenuously worded, the facts behind it still don’t exactly fill one with confidence in her. The high-profile irritant Louise Mensch, meanwhile, has given up on a parliamentary career after serving just over two years of her term. So much for ‘Tory feminism’.
The UK is currently ranked 57th here, and has never been spectacular at getting women into government. As of early 2012, women represented only 16% of Conservative MPs and 31% of Labour MPs – but what does the number of women in government mean?
Gender parity is obviously not synonymous with strategic influence or decision-making power, and, particularly after Exhibit M, it’s slightly preposterous to think that a particular demographic will vote or make policy according to gender rather than ideology.
The current government itself has provided examples of this, with some of its most prominent and media-friendly female MPs – step forward Nadine Dorries – also pushing the harshest lines on reproductive or employment rights. All of which strengthens the argument for viewing and judging the actions of female politicians on an individual basis, rather than viewing them all as an undifferentiated flash of eye candy whose political presence is considered automatically progressive. This last trope reached its probable peak, as did so much bland but deeply damaging smuggery, under Tony Blair and his insipid cohort of ‘Blair’s Babes’. In France, this year’s slightly more optimistic victory for the Socialist Party under Francois Hollande has nevertheless drawn comparisons with New Labour’s use of women MPs as relatively powerless tokens of progressiveness:
In an article entitled “The irritating photo”, Isabelle Germain asks why these highly qualified women are being treated like Hollande’s trophies. Just like the ‘Blair Babes’, Hollande’s female ministers have their own twee media nickname; the ‘Hollandettes’. Linguistically, the ‘Hollandettes’ are to Hollande what ‘Beliebers’ are to the pop star Justin Beiber – relative to their male leader and their roles determined by his authority. – Source.
Even for a place so historically rife with sniggering male privilege and suspended adolescence as the House of Commons, the language and attitudes recently faced by female MPs has been some of the most patronising for years – not least the current Prime Minister instructing Labour MP Angela Eagle to ‘Calm down, dear’ and not even bothering to acknowledge a question from the admittedly objectionable Nadine Dorries, instead dismissing her with the snide innuendo ‘I realise the honourable lady is frustrated’. Not that female parliamentarians should automatically be given an easy ride (hur hur), but neither should their opponents draw so instinctively and with quite so much entitled relish on lazy and reactionary stereotypes of hysteria and frustration as a means of avoiding the issues they wish to raise.
Perhaps of a piece with the deeply retrograde, public school and debating club roots of the present government, we seem to be seeing a renewed emphasis on the idea of politics as an adversarial, point-scoring arena in which women are ill-equipped to spar. This kind of thing is part of what The Thick Of It subverts and satirises so well. For all the show’s scattergun profanity, and the ‘violent sexual imagery’ and Freudian nightmares in its characters’ verbal volleys, the majority of humour in The Thick Of Itis derived not from the successful exercise of power but from impotence and frustration.
In addition, as Jem Bloomfield has noted elsewhere, there’s the extent to which the Lib-Dem avatars’ try-hard laddishness and awkward stabs at dick-swinging plays into their dislikeability – Roger Allam’s shire-tastic Peter Mannion MP, for all his downtrodden One Nation Tory-out-of-time woes, manages to exude more patrician authority than either of them. Overtly chauvinist or patronising attitudes are the preserve of characters, like the awkwardly overfamiliar Steve Fleming, whom the viewer is invited to regard with contempt.
Like The League of Gentlemen before it, The Thick Of It’s female grotesques are no less venal or useless or dim or inane than their male counterparts. Besides giving as good as they get, the show’s women, in the current series in particular, tend to crop up as self-possessed and efficient centres of competence within a given episode’s crisis and clusterfuck, whether it’s Terri’s brisk and matronly, almost instinctive civil servant’s professionalism, or Emma’s ruthless and steely slither up her party’s ladder of opportunity.
The exception to this is of course Rebecca Front’s portrayal of the well-meaning but hapless Nicola Murray MP, first introduced as a Minister put out to grass and now floundering as Leader of the Opposition. Chronically lacking in self-belief, ideas or ideology, beset by power-hungry underlings and colleagues, and unsupported by her offscreen husband, Murray is almost painfully unsuited for the environment in which she finds herself having to operate – but so, crucially, is Peter Mannion, and so was Murray’s forerunner, the spectacularly hangdog Hugh Abbott.
She has the odd display of offhand feminist snark (‘I love the division of labour in here – how the women do the heavy lifting and the men do the heavy sarcasm’), and the occasional pointedly gender-aware exchange with the show’s alpha male antihero Malcolm Tucker, but Murray’s incompetence and ineffectualness is never presented as a function of her being that well-worn cliché, a woman in a man’s world. It is simply the tragedy of several characters that they exist in a political and media world in which those who flourish are flavourless post-Blair clones like the largely unseen Dan Miller.
I haven’t seen a great deal written about The Thick Of It’s sexual politics – if there is any out there, do let us know in a comment. Returning to reality, it remains to be seen what effect the predominance of women in Plaid Cymru’s leadership is likely to have. Leanne Woods, Plaid’s first female leader, is refreshing enough for her unabashed socialist and republican ideals – although these principles are very much not common to the whole party.
Woods has attracted the always-dubious label of ‘outspoken’; like ‘feisty’ or the old favourite ‘pushy’, when I hear the word ‘outspoken’ used of a woman in public life I don’t exactly reach for my revolver but I certainly roll my eyes. in 2004 she was, mildly ridiculously, ordered to leave the Welsh Assembly’s debating chamber for referring to the Queen as ‘Mrs Windsor’. Even if you find a constitutional route to socialism more implausible than the idea of impending Welsh independence, Plaid are at least providing an example of how commitment to social justice can be combined with a commitment to gender representation, with both intertwined as strands of the same progressive goal.
Images © BBC
Found Feminism: Kulcha Jammin’
This post is belated – I thought I’d lost these pictures on an old phone – but wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, I found them on my computer the other day.
Some time in 2010 or 2011 (I’m dating this by my handset) the Harley Medical Group started advertising plastic surgery on the tube. Images of pert models told women that they needed ‘new year, new confidence’. Plastic surgery is nothing new, but pushing that advertising on people as they go up the escalators was a new and unwelcome assault. “You’re on your way to work, by the way, have you considered that your tits could be better?” Then something wonderful happened: people started answering back. (Click on images for zoom.)
I was tickled to see a few with red printed ‘sexist shit’ stickers which I’d seen sold at a feminist event a couple of weeks before… but then more appeared. People were writing their own slogans on stickers and whacking them on as the escalator sped them past. At first I just saw them at Kings Cross where I commuted through every day. Then, little by little, I saw them in more and more places. More handwriting, more slogans. This was… a movement.
And then, as the posters went away, so the stickers did too. I noticed there was a second wave of plastic surgery ads a few months later which seemed to have toned down their rhetoric a little. Still crap that unnecessary surgery was being pushed on women but something seemed to have twigged with the advertisers, too. This level of crap will not stand. I salute you, culture-jammers of London. Long may you reign.
Musical Chairs: “She’s got super-power lovin'”
Previous Musical Chair: Exterminating Angel by the Creatures, picked by Miranda
Super Sexy Woman – Sufjan Stevens
A far cry from the dulcet tones of Seven Swans (and this was well before the madness of The Age of Adz) – this is Sufjan Stevens’ description of a ‘super sexy woman’.
Snore?
But then that’s the weird thing – she’s ‘super-duper smart’, complete with ‘super-power lovin’ and ‘superhuman thighs’. This is also a woman who ‘shoots a super fart (the deadly silent kind)’ and has super-powered lips for ‘super suction’. Perhaps conveniently, she also has ‘super-powered hips (for super reproduction’). Not just for reproduction, though – she also wears spandex underwear – and to me this has always felt like a glorious hymn to a woman in all her flawed and genuine glory.
And it’s funny.
Hopeless Reimantic 2: That Thing That Comes After Love And Marriage
For more about this series on Romance Novel Tropes, read Rei’s Hopeless Reimantic intro post and Part 1: Virginal Heroines.
(The author recognises that the phenomenon discussed below is not, in fact, limited to people who are married and in love. I’ll get to marriage in romance novels some other time.)
[TRIGGER WARNING: Discussion of infertility and failed pregnancies below.]
[SPOILER WARNING: This piece discusses happenings from the first and third episodes of the new season of Doctor Who, as well as containing mild spoilers for Game Of Thrones.]
Last time on Hopeless Reimantic we talked about virginal heroines, and while I wasn’t totally positive on the topic, I will give the virginal heroine this: at least most of the time, she doesn’t stay virginal throughout the book. That trope has an expiration date, if you will. This next one is actually significantly more irritating to me – partly, admittedly, because it’s outside my experience in a way that I have no particular interest in remedying, but mainly because even if I didn’t feel that way I still think I’d find the topic clumsily handled and often just shoehorned in to make the romance more…legitimate.
Not everything has to be about babies, guys. Image by the illustrious Kate Beaton (http://www.harkavagrant.com), shirt by topatoco.
That’s right, folks: I’m talking about babies. Well, in brief. I suppose more accurately (and more vaguely) what I’m talking about is parenthood.
I suppose putting this column in second is kind of cheating, because it jumps to the end of the standard romance novel narrative – or, depending on how much edginess we’re going for, about three-quarters of the way through – and for that I apologise, but I promise you that the baby trope is all-pervasive enough that it’s not going to matter. An Extremely Standard Romance Novel, you see, goes something like this:
- [Play]boy meets [virgin] girl
- They deny their attraction to one another for a while (usually this consists of Mr Man insisting that our heroine is Just Like All Other Women and although she makes his dick hard he could never actually love her, and our heroine protesting any kind of attraction to Mr Man at all)
- Inevitably, sex.
- A brief honeymoon period, usually compounded by more sex
- Some kind of big misunderstanding that breaks them apart [at this point the heroine may or may not discover that she is pregnant]
- Reunion. Marriage. BABIES.
The story outlined above is common to a lot of romance novels (including our old friend from last time, Bought: Destitute Yet Defiant) but it is by no means the only sprog-imbued narrative out there in Romancelandia. Nor is it even the most baby-heavy. A quick search on Dear Author for “babies” turned up eight pages of hits and reminded me that Dear Author actually has a tag for “secret baby” plotlines – yes, they exist, and they’re common enough that they get their own category on review sites. These stories might start out with two separated lovers meeting again after many years – but wait! She has a child! The fact that it’s his child is blindingly obvious throughout, but often only revealed at the very end! What could be more romantic?
A nicely infuriating example of this trope on my Kindle is a little tale called Emergency: Wife Lost and Found – a Mills&Boon Medical Romance by Carol Marinelli that, to be fair, I have to admit was less awful upon revisitation than I remember it being the first time around. It’s a reunion tale between two doctors who met in medical school and married young because – shockingly – they got pregnant, but whose marriage then fell apart upon the loss of the baby.
This is not, to be clear, in itself a storyline I take issue with. The loss of a child is a devastating one, and especially to a couple who married essentially because of the child (there are some token protests that it would have happened anyway because they were in Real True Love, but still) – I can only imagine the effects of that on their relationship. It’s no wonder they divorced, and believeable that their meeting again after so long would be fraught with emotional tension (and I don’t wanna go into the whole thing, but there’s a lot of emotional tension for their meeting to be fraught with). And it’s understandable that some of the tension between them also comes from Lorna, the heroine, having since discovered that due to endometriosis she’s unlikely to carry another pregnancy to term. I would actually have been extremely interested in a book that had dealt with those issues – that explored the characters coming to term with Lorna’s infertility, and how that might have changed or strengthened their relationship.
The thing is, the book doesn’t actually deal with any of those issues. It skates over them briefly, and then True Love Sex happens, and Lorna…gets pregnant. Magically. And by the book’s epilogue, she has another child on the way, and her happiness is complete. See, true love fixed her!
Secret babies and miracle pregnancies are not limited to contemporary romance fiction, either, although it’s only here that the total absence (or extremely brief, give-it-one-sentence-and-handwave-it-away mentions of) abortion, adoption (either way!) and foster care are so totally and thoroughly angering. Historicals often feature a heroine whose dark secret is that, for whatever reason, she thinks she can’t have children but then, inexplicably, has at least one child by the end of the book; the widow whose husband never gave her children, but who then meets the hero and gets pregnant so fast you’d think they had some sort of corresponding velcro arrangement, is a particularly common one. Because that is the miracle that true love can provide.
True love also, incidentally, provides the incentive for wanting the kids in the first place in roughly half of these cases – there are quite a lot of cases of heroines (and heroes, to be fair) for whom a family was always endgame, but also a depressing number of heroines who get pregnant, having never wanted or thought about children before, and are midway through a totally justified freakout when they realise that the baby must be Mr Man’s and melt into a puddle of warm, maternal goo and aren’t scared anymore. And don’t get me started on the reaction some heroes have to this. I distinctly remember a book I read a few months ago – it was called Momentary Marriage, one of those “we’ll just marry for a year or so to help us both out of a jam that could totally not be solved any other way!” storylines – and the hero of our tale not only makes plans to impregnate the heroine without her knowledge so that she’ll stay with him, but spends about half a page getting turned on at the idea. If art does imitate life, there are a lot more pregnancy fetishists out there than you’d expect. All I’m sayin’.
The thing is, while this trope may be extremely common in romance novels – overwhelmingly, nauseatingly common, even – it isn’t confined to them. Remember Asylum of the Daleks, the first episode of the new season of Doctor Who? That one that came out a few weeks ago? Remember Rory and Amy’s Fifty Seconds Of Conflict, when he shouts at her for leaving him and her response is WELL YOU WANTED CHILDREN AND I CAN’T HAVE THEM, SO I GAVE YOU UP RATHER THAN ACTUALLY TRY TO HAVE A CONVERSATION ABOUT THIS? Yeah. Because in the UK in 2012, apparently adoption doesn’t exist, and neither does speaking to your partner. Later on in the series we have Mad Scientist Alien, who looks at Amy and can immediately tell that she’s had children because she is sad and fierce and caring, as if motherhood is the only experience that could confer these characteristics. Genre-hopping a bit to Game of Thrones, we have Daenerys Targaryen, who becomes a mother to her people because she’s never going to have children who aren’t dragons. (Which I personally don’t see the problem with. I would much rather have dragon-babies than baby-babies, although I suppose feeding them would be something of a negotiation.) And these are just the examples I can think of off the top of my head.
I appreciate that a lot of people do want children. I appreciate that some would even go so far as to say that their children are the best things in their lives, and that is valid and legitimate and completely worthy of representation in fiction. In spite of all that, though, as you may be able to tell, I have extremely little patience with this trope, and I’m going to try and explain why without sputtering too incoherently. Bear with me a moment.
Okay.
Okay.
First of all, I have a huge problem with motherhood being portrayed as the only really worthwhile thing a woman can aspire to. Motherhood is worthwhile, and it is important, and it deserves to be venerated and respected. But I object to the idea that it is the only thing that is worthwhile and important and worthy of veneration and respect. This elevation to the exclusion of all other things is not, as I’m not the first person to point out, extended to fatherhood, either – a man who never has children may well have been doing other, equally important, things, whereas a woman who’s never had children is often seen as an object of either pity or scorn.
So far, it seems that the only wish-fulfilment medium aimed specifically at women overwhelmingly portrays babies as the reward a good woman gets for being a good person and a good lover and without which no other goodness is really, truly good. Where does that leave women who have real-life style infertility – the kind that isn’t fixed by falling in lasting love – or those who just never had that wish in the first place?
And that brings me to my next point. I’d like everyone to bear in mind, by the way, that I say this next part as a person who doesn’t actually like children that much. I’ve definitely mellowed towards them as I’ve grown older – meeting some actually nice ones that I wasn’t forced to hang out with because I was presenting female at the time has helped – but I’m not a particular fan. They’re okay; I might want my own someday, but right now I’m leaning towards not. (That’s right, Friend Of My Friend’s Family Who Wrote Me That Poem About How Not Having Kids Is A Waste Of My Genes Five Years Ago1 – the answer’s still no.)
Let’s review, shall we? So far this segment we’ve talked about pregnancy, secret pregnancy, miracle pregnancy, infertility, abortion, adoption and the concept of motherhood.
What have we not – really – talked about?
Any actual babies.
I do understand that it can be difficult to write about the children in child-plotlines themselves, especially if the story in question is actually supposed to be focused on relationships between adults. But there’s a pretty big difference between “this character is important but doesn’t really do much beyond eat and cry and poop, so I can’t write too much about them” and “we need something important in this story! What’s important to women? BABIES! Let’s put some babies in here”.
I suppose my overwhelming thought is that if it’s so difficult to write about pregnancies or children in a well-rounded way that makes them more than plot devices (or Plot Moppets, as the good folk over at Smart Bitches refer to them) writers should maybe think more carefully about including a pregnancy storyline, and how to treat it if they do decide to put one in (as, er, it were). Babies are the tiny humans that shape the future of our world. They deserve more respect than that.
That’s it for today! Next time on Hopeless Reimantic…either marriage or playboy heroes, I haven’t decided yet.
See you then!
- Kate Beaton’s “Shut Up About Babies” shirt available here.
- True freaking story. [↩]
Jessica Rabbit
I’ve set myself a pretty tough task here. I’ve picked a film clip I find particularly memorable from my childhood, with a character who utters some immortal words that I’d like to use to pose you all a related question. Jessica Rabbit. She’s a pin-up, and a cartoon, and a key part of the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, from which the clip is taken.
For anyone who hasn’t seen the film before, this is the first time we (and Eddie – Bob Hoskins’ character) see Jessica, who we already know is married to the eponymous Roger (a cartoon rabbit). There’s a lot more to this film that we first realise, as I discovered recently thanks to this article, and it’s got me thinking about Jessica and her famous line – is there more to her too?
“I’m not bad… I’m just drawn that way.”
That’s a line that I’ve always been fascinated by, even as a kid. Jessica’s appearance never sat well with me: the dress, the heels, the boobs, waist, lips, eyes – everything was just designed for one reason. That reason is summed up very simply with that line she delivers in Eddie’s office. Were the film writers trying to draw attention to something? She’s been made by men, for men – but she isn’t too happy about it.
Here’s your food-for-thought prompt: Is the character’s acknowledgement that she’s been made a certain way an important admission, or a clever distraction from her creators?
Found Feminism: Jael Boscawen (1647-1730)
This isn’t ghoulish, I promise you. Although it does involve graveyards. In a cool, feminist way though, right?
This plaque is in St Mary Abbots Parish Church in Kensington, and is a slice of history I thought worth sharing.
An epic tale. Set in stone.
Let me introduce you to someone I didn’t know existed until a couple of weeks ago. Jael Boscawen. She was born Jael Godolphin in 1647, a revolutionary year in which King Charles I was captured by Cromwell, the Levellers published their manifesto and the New Model Army marched on London.
Challenging times. And a challenging lady, it seems.
Before we get down to details, the case for the defence.
Why is a bit of stone in a church and a woman long dead a relevant Found Feminism?
Well, it’s about history and culture. We know that there has been a problem with women in history – as in, there often don’t seem to be as good, or rich, or as many records for the ladies of the house as the menfolk. Despite it being almost certain that there were as many women in the past as men. There’s an underlying collective shoulder shrug of “well, that’s because women generally didn’t really ever do anything of any note.” With the snide sidenote of “and generally never will”.
Which is sexism at its most toxic, and history at its most lazy.
When we do find written documentation about women like this one, it’s even more important and valuable to dive into it. Seeking out these women and their history is part of the feminist project. Writing the history of women, and telling it, is part of that project too. The more women we can find from the past, the more confident we will be at reminding ourselves that being a woman does not confine you to being a helpmeet. Then or now.
This is especially true when the women are not quite what we might expect. And such is the case of Jael Godolphin.
What struck me about this plaque in particular is that it seems to be the only record I can find of her. She’s a mystery. A quick Google of her name doesn’t reveal an awful lot. She doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. Her life, as far as we savvy internet creatures are concerned, was no life at all. She was born, she married, she had children, she died. The same bland story of so many women in the past, it seems.
Finding a history written in stone is significant because it indicates how important she must have been (this kind of dedication, with its prominent place by the church door, would not have been cheap). But more significant, perhaps, is how she is described. The stereotypical view of a “good” woman from this time period would have her as a dutiful wife, daughter, mother, etc.
Not so with Jael Godolphin. The words written about her are about, well… her.
She was adorned with rare faculties of the mind, singular acuteness, sagacity and judgement, with a generous heart.
Let’s be clear. There’s no prattle about how meek, mild and akin to the Virgin Mary she was. No, this woman from the 17th century is immortalised in an expensive chunk of stone, by people who loved and respected her for her mind. Her brain. Her ability to make decisions. To make good decisions, certainly – she had a kind heart, but the brain came first. Exactly the sort of text you might expect to see on the grave of a (male) patron.
Now this is the bit where it gets even better.
Confessedly the ornament and at the same time the tacit reproach of a wicked Age.
Not only was she smart, she was also complicated. I would add her to a fantasy dinner table guest list in a heartbeat, if only to be able to unpick that sentence. What does it mean? In my head she is an Elizabeth I figure, who used the perceptions of her gender to her advantage, self-aware and very canny. But all I have are these words. Not even a picture. However, given all the problems with women and images, perhaps these words are better?
I’m going to end on a shoutout for events such as National Women’s History Month and resource gathering projects such as Wikipedia’s Women’s History. This post was done with love, but not a lot of technical know-how on the whole history front. I stopped doing the subject at 14 when it became clear I was not getting much out of endless, collective-guilt-inducing rehashes of the bombing of Dresden.
If there are any historians out there inspired by this and better at research than me, I’d love to know more about her.
- Found Feminism: an ongoing series of images, videos, photos, comics, posters or excerpts – anything really, which shows feminist ideas at work in the everyday world. What’s brightened your day, or made you stop and think? Share it here – send your finds to [email protected]!
Taxidermy, women and horror
SPOILER ALERT: You really ought to have seen Psycho by now but on the offchance you haven’t I shall be giving away the twist at the end. Likewise Roald Dahl’s superb short story The Landlady, but you can read it quickly here.
My taxidermy adventure
After reading about Amanda’s Autopsies taxidermy workshops on the fabulous Mookychick I signed up for the next one as quick as you could say “lifelong interest in stuffed animals”. Our victims: guinea pigs.
Me with Boudica G. Pig
The workshop was fascinating, absorbing, and not as gruesome as I had feared. Having been frozen and bashed about a bit, my subject (who I’ve since named Boudica) didn’t look anything like a live guinea pig when I met it, so its thingness made it surprisingly easy to cut into.
Although I’m a big fan of badly stuffed animals, from the famous Horniman Walrus to the facebook page du jour, following the workshop I have a newfound respect for the taxidermist’s art. Taking the skin off was reasonably straightforward, but my god it’s difficult to get the creature into the right shape.
But I was reasonably pleased with the result, and Boudica G. Pig proudly adorns my mantelpiece. At some point I need to get her a spear, helmet and tiny chariot but that’s a project for another day.
Women wield the scalpel
Interestingly, as well as the glamorous Amanda herself and her assistant on the day I’d estimate that the workshop participants were nearly all women. Taxidermy is clearly kinda fashionable at the moment, and although I can’t say it was at the top of my equality agenda I’m pleased that women are getting stuck in.
As noted on the brilliant website of academic Rachel Poliquin who has just written a book about taxidermy, there are a surprising number of stuffed animals finding their way into contemporary art. I first heard about Polly Morgan‘s work a few years ago, but there’s also Merel Bekking, Claire Morgan, and the incredibly disturbing work of Kate Clark.
There are even signs that the tired old TV trope of taxidermy as a hobby for creepy men is being eroded, with a friendly, sympathetic taxidermist as a central character in Dinner for Schmucks and even a sexy indie flick with a kooky girl taxidermist as the romantic lead.
Creepy cool
That said, no matter how cool it becomes I doubt taxidermy will ever stop being creepy altogether. Firstly because it makes you think of death. Stuffed animals act as a kind of hipster memento mori. Secondly because part of taxidermy’s appeal (particularly as part of an artwork) is its uncanny effect, the ambiguity of animate or inanimate, alive or dead. And finally because taxidermy is so firmly lodged in the symbolic language of horror, where it also takes on a fascinating gendered aspect.
One of the victims in Cabin In The Woods gets friendly with a stuffed wolf head. Image: MGM
As TV Tropes notes most haunted houses, villain lairs, and cabins in the wood contain a trophy deer head with antlers that cast eerie shadows, or a stuffed owl, wolf or bear with glinting eyes and gleaming teeth. Whether predator or prey these creatures provide a handy visual signal for danger to the audience (and occasionally the protagonist) and get them meditating on the theme of death.
Taxidermy and patriarchy
But there’s also a number of influential horror films that contain some form of human taxidermy as an especially unsettling treat, most of which draw some of their grisly inspiration from the sickening ‘trophies’ of real life serial killer Ed Gein.
In The Horror of Everyday Life: Taxidermy, Aesthetics, and Consumption in Horror Films Jeffrey Niesel argues that taxidermy in horror films is often used as a way to silence feminine subjectivity. He quotes from Jane Caputi’s book The Age of Sex Crime, in which she argues that sexual serial killings, far from being ‘deviant’, represent the logic of patriarchy taken to an especially brutal extreme:
Serial sexual murder is not some inexplicable explosion/epidemic of an extrinsic evil or the domain only of the mysterious psychopath. On the contrary, such murder is an eminently logical step in the procession of patriarchal values, needs, and rule of force.
For Niesel, “taxidermy represents the most literal expression of male violence, and reveals both the violence and the ultimate instability located at the core of a patriarchal system that relies on validation from passive feminine subjects.” He views taxidermy in Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs as an expression of the crisis of masculinity as Norman Bates, the Sawyer family and Buffalo Bill strive to possess women while silencing their subjectivity, turning them into objects. As Niesel observes, “a stuffed woman is the perfect woman because her male companion can make her say whatever he wants.”
“As harmless as one of these stuffed birds”
Norman Bates with one of his owls. Image: Paramount
I’ll share some of his thoughts on Psycho, because it’s my favourite, and because it features animal and human taxidermy, hooray! In Psycho the connection between women and “stuffed birds” is made pretty clear. Norman tells Marion that “you eat like a bird” and shortly afterwards describes his mother as being “as harmless as one of those stuffed birds”, a comparison ‘she’ herself makes later. He also tells Marion “I think only birds look well stuffed because they’re kind of passive to begin with.” As Niesel points out:
Birds are not really any more or less active or passive than other creatures, but his statement resonates throughout the film because it describes the way women are treated. Women are expected to be stuffed birds, and there is a constant tension involved in trying to enforce their “passivity.” Women pose a threat in the film because they might do something like steal $40,000 (as Marion does)
I particularly like Niesel’s reading of the moment when Lila Crane finally confronts the stuffed Mrs Bates: she is in fact confronting the full horror of violent suppression of female agency and subjectivity. She is facing herself. Well no wonder it always makes me jump.
Turning the tables
Applying Niesel’s analysis to one of my very favourite examples of taxidermy in popular culture, Roald Dahl’s short story The Landlady (published in 1959, a year before Psycho was released) gave me an insight into why it’s so incredibly effective. It’s not just the chill as you realise that the unnamed landlady is a serial killer with a penchant for human taxidermy, but her tremendous gender transgression in being so. She collects handsome young men, and wants the protagonist, Billy, as her latest possession. She even eyes him up in an objectifying gesture that will be familiar to most women on the planet:
“And it is such a pleasure, my dear, such a very great pleasure when now and again I open the door and I see someone standing there who is just exactly right.” She was halfway up the stairs, and she paused with one hand on the stair rail, turning her head and smiling down at him with pale lips. “Like you,” she added, and her blue eyes traveled slowly all the way down the length of Billy’s body, to his feet, and then up again.
Even though he can see she’s a bit unhinged Billy’s mistake is to assume that she is harmless (“there was no question about that”) because she is a middle-aged woman. He is not prepared for such a dramatic reversal in their gender roles, from predator to prey, from subject to object.
Found Feminism: Gentlemen’s Baby Changing
This is actually the greatest Found Feminism I have ever had the joy to stumble across because it neatly combines two of the bees in my feminist bonnet and previous article topics: loos and Dads. I get agitated and hand-wavey over both of them, so now I’m doubly agitated and can barely type.
This is the sort of Found Feminsim I might like the best.
Have you ever seen anything more beautiful in your whole life?
The series is all about being able to showcase positive change in our society, to highlight all the good work that is being done to make the universe a better place for everyone by bringing down all the shitty, stupid barriers and obstacles that mean if we present as a certain gender we can/can’t/must/must not/do/do not delete-as-appropriate bullshit where we all feel we have to behave in a particular way.
We don’t. We shouldn’t have to. Feminism is all about not falling for this nonsense.
My ovaries do not compel me to buy pink products. If I wear a skirt on Tuesday I am not inherently more “female” than when I was wearing trousers on Monday.
And dear, sweet reader: just because a person has the capacity to get pregnant and give birth does not mean that they are then automatically and by crushing biological imperative the only person capable of looking after that child.
So I give to you this offering. A sign in Holland Park that lifted my heart, coming as it does from the heartland of nice, yummy mummy middle class London. A space where Dads can go and do the stuff that babies need. Y’know. The wiping, cleaning, icky stuff that they don’t put on the tube adverts for IVF. The real stuff. The day-to-day stuff. The stuff you really need someone to do if you are little and can’t go to the bathroom for yourself. Caring stuff. Because Dads should be given every and all opportunity and support in public places to be as caring and nurturing as Mums. That’s one of the things that feminism is all about.
I am not really a baby person. I am, however, fully in favour of the idea that if we (as a society) are going to have them, then we should make sure they are properly looked after. Which means giving men as much as women the opportunity to be amazing parents.
And to change the nappies. Which I hear is important.
Musical Chairs: “Exterminating Angel” by the Creatures
We recently, as a team, signed “BadrepUK” up to This Is My Jam. This got me thinking about the songs I might submit to the Grand Communal Cacophony Mixtape. Given our name, we kicked off with Joan Jett (of course), but I think the next thing I’m going to send our Rhian (who is curating the Jams at the moment) is actually this.
It’s a Creatures single from ’99. It’s an acquired taste. But I like it, for a few reasons.
Exterminating Angel was released on a late Creatures album, Anima Animus, in 1999, and was still a dancefloor mainstay in the early-to-mid-’00s in the kind of sticky-floored goth clubs I liked to frequent in my late teens and early 20s.
It’s a weird track in the context of the rest of the album, nearly all of which is gentler, and none of which has the same relentless, malicious, jagged electro edge. It’s the track you remember the most, with its Biblical, apocalyptic theme and pounding percussion. The rest of the album’s tracks kind of have to be coaxed out from a musical cupboard-under-the-stairs where they’ve hidden from its sweeping bite. After picking up the CD – the day after it and I collided on one of the aforementioned sticky goth dancefloors – I spent some months hitting the repeat button on Exterminating Angel, disappointed that it wasn’t all like this.
Why I’m submitting it to BadRep’s Jam in particular, though, is this: it is entirely from the point of view of the Old Testament’s Angel of Death, on a mission to kill the sons of Egypt, as per the Bible story. But it’s not just about that. Maybe it’s just Siouxsie’s delivery, or the fact that the lyrics are both about a story where only the sons of privilege count, and disdainful to the back teeth of that fact (“poor little rich thing”) – but I think the angel is very much coded as a vengeful female voice, enacting all the grisly, monstrous, destructive urges that are enshrined as natural in so many men and rarely if at all in women. “For the hell of it,” in fact. (VH1 asked Siouxsie not to perform it because it contains references to menstrual blood. Oh, and piss.)
It’s one of the Unwritten Rules of Siouxsie Sioux that on lyrical face value, one is often only ever half sure what she’s actually on about1, but I think Exterminating Angel is a uniquely beautiful and ugly track. It resonates with me on a deeper level than the Banshees’ single Cities In Dust, which is about the destruction of Pompeii and is similarly Big, Ancient and World-Ending in scope.
I Googled “angel of death female” to compare gendered representations of the angel in the story. Wikipedia popped up first, and helpfully listed several countries where folklore representations of Death more generally are female (death is a “she”, for example, in the folklore of some Slavic communities). But most of the results on my first page weren’t about the Bible story, or the angel figure, at all.
Instead, they were mainly about other things we apply the phrase “angel of death” to in a female-gendered way. Female serial killers abounded, along with headlines about women in the nursing profession (so often referred to in things like Marie Curie Cancer Care literature as “angels”) who ill-treated their charges. A few “sexy nurse – evil angel of death version with black dress!” fancy dress costumes completed the picture.
There was nothing particularly mythic or powerful about the way any of these women were framed by the “angel of death” phrase, though some were dangerous. And although the gender of mythic death personifications does vary worldwide, the overall tone of my research online about female iterations of this particular mythic and Biblical figure, taken as a whole, was often merely patronising. To get to anything useful, one needed a pair of Sexism Waders.
I think that says it all, really, about why this song mattered to me when I heard it. Female violence is so often either downplayed or fetishised – witness how long it took women to get to box at Olympic level – where in men it is normalised (at least as a cultural idea if not a legal reality). And Siouxsie’s angel is a sort of horrible challenge to that idea. There’s precisely nothing nice about her whatsoever. Hers is a grand cry of “Piss on it, I’m sick of it” – and although I’m generally a friendly sort who’s about as murderous as a bag of Haribo Starmix, I have a great many days when, re: the patriarchy at least, I can certainly get behind that sentiment.
- For example, Christine. “Now she’s in purple, now she’s the turtle”, anyone? Yeah. This is coherent by comparison. [↩]